Identification and Evaluation of Human Errors in Nurses in Different Wards of Yazd Madar Hospital Before and After Proposed Control Strategies Using SHERPA Method in 2019

Despite widespread efforts to reduce human error in different occupations, unsafe practices and behaviors are still the main cause of many accidents. The occurrence of medical errors in health care systems as one of the most important factors in decreasing the quality of services in this field has received much attention in recent years. Therefore, this study aimed to identify and evaluate all kinds of human error among nurses of Yazd Mother hospital.

This cross-sectional and descriptive-analytical study was conducted at Yazd Mother hospital in 2019. All nursing duties in gynecology, infertility, emergency, neonatal intensive care, and in vitro fertilization were identified and subdivided using hierarchical task analysis (HTA) and then analyzed using SHERPA method.

The highest number of errors was in a gynecology (83), infertility (73), emergency (54), neonatal intensive care (31) and in vitro fertilization, respectively. The highest percentage of errors was related to performance in all sectors. The least frequent error was selection error.

The results of this study showed that functional errors account for a large proportion of errors, which should be the priority of control strategies in each segment for these types of errors in order to prevent such errors. The magnitude of the errors identified after the proposed control solutions in all sections indicated the fact that acceptable solutions can be achieved by applying these strategies.